Features
A Little More Knowledge Lights Our Way
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Who gets to take meaning from things and have that meaning-making respected and valued?
Shorts
What to the Droid Is Life Day?
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The Rebel Alliance fought for freedom, but this freedom was predicated on the automation of labor — on droids.
Features
Sacred Objects
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A medieval relic economy operates in the Star Wars universe—and in the universe of its fans.
Shorts
Far, Far Away?
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The line between cultural influence and cultural appropriation can be blurry.
Shorts
I’ve Never Seen Anything
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How could the Jedi Order vanish from public memory in less than a generation?
Features
Death to the Ewoks
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Though the genocidal event isn’t canon, many fans apparently wish it was.
Shorts
From A Certain Point Of View
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By denying access to the original cuts of the saga films, George Lucas has left us without the critical cultural documents needed for understanding the franchise’s power.
Features
If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Batuu
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To work, a theme park needs to collapse the mythic pasts that it depicts with the pasts of our own lives.
Features
Fandom: A Star Wars Story
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This is about much more than Star Wars—it is about media bias and “information disorder” in the twenty-first century.
Shorts
2019 Contingent Book List
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When you’re shopping for books this season, consider a contingent scholar.
Features
Bringing Academics To The Table
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What happens when academics collaborate with the restaurant industry? Good things (and better food).
Shorts
Embroidery as Record and Resistance
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The association of embroidery with the feminine has led many to overlook its history as a subversive medium.
Postcards
A Postcard from the 2019 NEMA Conference
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At museum conferences, there are usually no easily-portable solutions. Institutional differences matter.
Postcards
A Postcard From New Delhi
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Dogs can be found laying on cooler surfaces or in the shade. Cats saunter into the canteen meowing for attention but also a bite of your lunch.
Field Trip
How Kelsey Utne Does History
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This is the first in a new series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history.
Shorts
Who Was Tank Kee?
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He wanted to be an ally of the Chinese immigrant. By pretending to be one himself.
Story-Shaped Things
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Historians tell stories about the past. This philosopher thinks those stories are often wrong–and dangerous.
Field Trip
Archiving Danville
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The mental institution had a lot of old volumes stored in a conference room, but they were behind locked cabinet doors and no one knew exactly what was there.
Postcards
A Postcard From Washington, D.C.
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Seeing Railway Mail Service badges makes the postal carriers and clerks that I read about in other archives seem more real.
Shorts
Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?
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Is philosophy uniquely hostile to trans people? No. It is hostile to marginalized people in general.
Shorts
A Brief History of Trans Philosophy
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Philosophy has long been something done to trans people, not by them.
Postcards
A Postcard From South Bend, Indiana
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The divided research trip is a necessity for a full-time high school teacher.
Field Trip
A Most Unique Museum
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From waste containment during the Black Death to a toilet that cost $19 million, the museum is impressively comprehensive.
Postcards
A Postcard From London
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Archival research can be like spending eight hours looking for lost keys.
What is Contingent?
Celebrating the Contingent Community
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This magazine is much bigger than its staff, or even its writers.
What is Contingent?
History Is For Everyone
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For all our planning and grand designs, Contingent’s success has rested entirely on having support from others.
What is Contingent?
Showing the Work
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Sharing the products of historical inquiry isn’t enough—we’ve got to show our work.
Field Trip
Of Strip Mines and Coal Slurry
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I’d spent years living simultaneously inside the West and outside of it.
Features
Arming the Past: An Interview with Michael Bellesiles
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He wrote one of the most contentious works of history from the last century. And he sat down with Daniel Gullotta for his first public discussion of the controversy in nearly a decade.
Postcards
A Postcard From Petoskey and Ann Arbor, Michigan
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The architect of the contemporary anti-immigration movement comes from Petoskey.
Postcards
A Postcard From Belgium and Northeastern Congo
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When visiting these archives, the violent and extractive history of Belgium’s presence in the Congo was impossible to ignore.
Contingent Podcast #4: E.L. Meszaros
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Did Western civilization begin in the Fertile Crescent? What’s it like being a modern circus performer?
Reviews
The Women Who Showed Us Life
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Over its four-decade run, LIFE Magazine had 105 staff photographers. Six of them were women.
Shorts
Roads by Other Names
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Renaming streets and erecting statues aren’t nothing—but they aren’t enough, either.
Features
All the Presidents’ Librarians
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Despite being spied on and intimidated during my time in Yorba Linda, I still think presidential libraries are too important for historians to wash their hands of them.
Postcards
A Postcard from Frankfort, Kentucky and San Marino, California
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Always talk to your archivist.
Shorts
What They Don’t Want You to Know About Jesus Christ and the Seer of Poughkeepsie
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150 years before the Da Vinci Code, there was a man who said he could talk to spirits.
Postcards
A Postcard From Lviv, Ukraine
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Thousands came here in the spring of 1947, attempting to flee famine in eastern and central Ukraine.
Features
From #TakeEmDown to #TakeEmOn
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She led the movement against Memphis’s Confederate monuments, and now she’s running for mayor. An interview with Tami Sawyer.
Shorts
In Memoriam: Panbabylonianism
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Was ancient Mesopotamia the ur-text of the “West”? Is that even a good question?
Field Trip
2019 Student Digital History Roundup
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What does doing history look like? Let today’s history students and teachers show you.
Field Trip
The Archive after the Revolution
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They meant to remake the world, and they left quite the paper trail.
Shorts
It Was History All Along, Mom
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Flowers, a day at the spa, a biography of Andrew Jackson? A meditation on mothers, history, Mother’s Day gift-giving.
Reviews
What Happened to My People
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The second half of PBS’s Reconstruction documentary begins where the traditional narrative ends.
Shorts
“No One’s Ever Really Gone”
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It is easy to forget, even for historians, that the future does not exist.
Reviews
A Usable History of Reconstruction
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The greatest strength of the new PBS documentary is its desire to inform contemporary debates. But this may also be one of its weaknesses.
Field Trip
This Is Not an Interrogation
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Veterans get the chance to tell their stories; my role is to facilitate that process.
Field Trip
The Circus Hitler Said He Loved
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Simultaneously beloved and despised by the Nazi regime, their stories are now being uncovered by a team of researchers.
Shorts
Cooking with the Time & Talents Club
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The classic Parsi cookbook has changed much over the decades, yet remains curiously old-fashioned.
Mailbag
Why Do Historians Still Have To Go To Archives?
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Why do historians go to archives? Hasn’t everything already been digitized?
Shorts
I Am A Historian I Make Exhibits
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Who are museum exhibits for, and what difference does that make?
Features
Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa
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Before ancient aliens—before Lizard People—there was the search for living dinosaurs.
Mailbag
How Much Money Do Historians Make From Their Writing?
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In general, academic writing doesn’t earn you anything, and most of the time, it costs you.
Shorts
Selling Angola
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It is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. So who is going to its gift shop, and why?
Reviews
Adams Family Values
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They were a family of seekers, shaped not only by their heritage but by their travels abroad.
Mailbag
What Are the Different Kinds of College Faculty?
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Their jobs and salaries may differ, but you should still call them “Professor.”
Features
Did the Left Think Watergate Was a Distraction?
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Was the Left as skeptical about Watergate as it is today about the Trump-Russia story?
Features
War Happens in Dark Places, Too
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In thick woods and swamplands and on small river islands, they bided their time.
Updates
Emily’s Contingent Story
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We wanted a site that actively considered the people who would use it.
Updates
Marc’s Contingent Story
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We are making a bet: that a different approach to historical scholarship will have an audience.
